http://www.prickly-paradigm.com/paradigm1.pdf

At my local bar I have an acknowleded table, certain control over the TV channel, service speed and pour rate of booze that fully compensates for my level of tipping. Now I have friends that may not keep up on tipping but still keep up on service levels,then again they are here everyday. Money may not buy you love, but consistently high levels of tipping can pay significant dividends going forwards. My score on the stud muffin scale may be distressingly close to ‘2’ on the other hand my drink doesn’t go dry and menu substitutions don’t end up a problem. Does my tipping rate actually maximize my efficiency outcome? Not always. Does the equity equation get better? Well mostly yes.

Ask anyone in the hospitality business, rich people are crappy tippers, mostly because they simply don’t relate to the concept of ‘There for the Grace of God Go I” For them tipping just tranactional friction and not a recognition that societal distribution of the gains from productivity is not distributed in equitable manners to actual contribution

The kind of reasoning I object to would be analogous to the following. An EU fan might argue that (i) even preferences that don’t satisfy EU can be represented by some kind of utility model (for example rank-dependent). (ii) Hence, such observations support utility-based analysis of choice under uncertainty (iii)Hence, it’s OK to use EU whenever you feel like it.

Adjust your meds and see if this makes sense :-)

If you don’t think cardinal utility matters in a meaningful way, except as a way of turning stuff that’s hard to use calculus on into stuff that’s easy to use calculus on, then it seems to me that you can’t really accept the expected utility model of risk-aversion, lotteries, etc.

If you don’t accept the expected utility model, then it seems to me that the reduction of compound lotteries axiom isn’t really meaningful.

If you don’t think that the reduction of compound lotteries axiom means anything, then it seems that the Allais paradox is no paradox at all, since the Allais paradox depends on the expected utility model of risk or somesuch.

If the Allais paradox isn’t meaningful, then all of your work on rank-dependent expected utility seems to be a waste of time.

You fool! Don’t you realize your entire life has been a waste? You cannot even follow your own assumptions in deciding what is even a meaningful problem to attempt to tackle!

Just kidding. Maybe.

Sorry. I’m a little medicated at the moment.

But perhaps you can make your case about the relevance of this work as models of, or useful for, deliberative democracy?

As a fledgling grad student I fell under the sway of Hayward Alker for a time, and endured (too) many an evening in the MIT AI lab hearing about the promise of work by McCarthy and Shank and Abelson, and how RELATUS (or some such thing) would eventually interpret political arguments in real time, and somehow do this in ways that had something to do with a Hegelian ontology, and reflected the beauty of LISP and SCHEME …

… guess I blocked it all from my mind—not that LISP isn’t beautiful; I just never saw the software doing anything remotely like what was being pitched.

For all that work in argumentation theory and computational models of human understanding and argumentation, how are things working out so far?

You guys have any systems yet, based on all those varied formalisms, that can reliably interpret complex political and philosophical arguments, and yield a recognizably cogent evaluation and judgement based on their interpretation?

More pointedly, do any formal models of argumentation help us clarify, challenge, and extend (or perhaps simply reject) extant work on deliberative democracy? Obviously there are general ways to make a claim of relevance (but that’s open to the game theorists too: deliberation may often involve signaling). I’m looking for formal models of argumentation that speak directly to the sorts of concepts and intuitions at the heart of deliberative democracy.

I’m more than happy to be educated on this, and that isn’t a rhetorical flourish: I really mean it. A lot of water must have gone under the bridge since I last bumped into some of the literatures you mention, and if there is recent work in formal argumentation theory that speaks directly and fruitfully to the deliberative democracy literature, then I definitely want to know about it.

But I wonder if for now I’ll stand by my a somewhat weaker verson of my original quip? There’s not (yet) any useful way to formally model the most important concepts and intuitions lurking in the deliberative democracy literature—certainly not in the game-theoretic literature on signaling, which really was the point of my original quip.

But Sahlins may have said it best.

“Thomas Kuhn and others have wondered whether
the social sciences have paradigms and paradigm
shifts like the natural sciences. Nothing seems to get concluded because some say that the natural sciences don’t even have them, and others that in the social sciences you couldn’t tell a paradigm from a fad.
Still, considering the successive eras of functional explanation of cultural forms—first, by their supposed effects in promoting social solidarity, then, by their economic utility, and lately, as modes of hegemonic power—there does seem to be something like a Kuhnian movement in the social sciences. Though there is at least one important contrast to the natural sciences.
In the social sciences, the pressure to shift from one theoretical regime to another, say from economic benefits to power effects, does not appear to follow from the piling up of anomalies in the waning paradigm, as it does in natural science. In the social sciences, paradigms are not outmoded because they explain less and less, but rather because they explain more and more—until, all too soon, they are explaining just about everything. There is an inflation effect in social science paradigms, which quickly cheapens them. The way that “power” explains everything from Vietnamese second person plural pronouns to Brazilian workers’ architectural bricolage,
African Christianity or Japanese sumo wrestling. But then, if the paradigm begins to seem
less and less attractive, it is not really for the standard logical or methodological reasons. It is not because in thus explaining everything, power explains nothing, or because differences are being attributed to similarities, or because contents are dissolved in their (presumed) effects. It’s because everything turns out to be the same: power. Paradigms change in the social sciences because, their persuasiveness really being more political than empirical, they become commonplace universals. People get tired of them. They get bored.”

““Deliberation,” however, ends up becoming “signalling,” or a bayesian puzzle of why disagreement might persist—perhaps because there doesn’t seem to be any useful (let alone minimally plausible) way to model the philosophical notion that we might recognize, sincerely debate, and occasionally be swayed by, the force of the stronger argument, framed within public reason, and in light of exant evidence.”.

Well, again, there’s a relevant literature which belies this statement. Try searching for argumentation theory—there are now many models (some formal and computational) of how intelligent, autonomous entities may represent, formulate, exchange, consider and revise arguments between one another. In addition to the 2300 years of philosophical writing on the topic, there are now regular conferences on computational models of argument (see the ArgMAS and COMMA conferences) as well as regular conference series in philosophy (OSSA and ISSA). See also the journals Argumentation and Informal Logic, and recent special issues of the journals, Artificial Intelligence Journal, the Journal of Logic and Computation, and IEEE Intelligent Systems.

You have to build your brand image, and if you already have one, you better hope it isn’t already tarnished as a ‘cheap’ product. Packard Bell would have been hard pressed to move ‘upclass’ with their PCs after years of cheap, low quality products in the ‘90s, so they were bought out and the brand was killed in favor of less damaged names. Had they jacked prices, they just would have sold fewer units.

30. (I’m not picking on you, abb1, you just happen to be saying the stuff I thought worth responding to.) Most(not all) economists wouldn’t bother explaining your dog, because the Psych guys have this rather thoroughly and famously explained. (Pavlovian conditioning, combined with the pack-animal’s instinctive eagerness to please the Alpha) Econ might take a stab at how big the treat has to be relative to the ‘trick’ to incent cooperation in the first place, though.

14. The fact that tips tend to be a larger part of waiter’s income than wages suggests that restaurants believe they have cheaper ways of monitoring and incenting the waiter. (By, say, firing waiters who cultivate tips in ways which are expensive for the restaurant.) The customer can’t really ‘fire’ the waiter without ‘firing’ the restaurant. There are industries where the proprietor practically charges his workers for the privilege of working there, because access to the customers is so valuable. (Strip clubs and barber shops can be ‘interpreted’ through this lens, and the model can be adjusted for Flea markets and antique malls.)

Do economists always assume people ask “what will I gain” rather than “what will it cost”?

The tax wedge? In both the US and the UK there are significant differences in the amount of money the server receives for a $ spent by the customer, depending upon whether that money is handed over as a tip or in higher prices which feed through into a wage. The two country systems are very different but in the UK, higher prices pay VAT, then two sets of National Insurance then income tax. Tips pay only the last. That’s a difference of 40 pence in the pound in income for the waiter for one pound spent by the customer.

This doesn’t, as above, explain why single visit people should (or do) tip, but it might well explain why good waiters (yes, I am arrogant enough to insist that I was one) preferentially work at places without a built in service charge.

(I doubt that anyone wants a full description of the tax treatment in each country but if anyone is thinking of papers on the subject I would suggest that this issue of differential taxation is important.)

44. There’s a reason I put “compensated” in them parentheses. Still, Giffen goods are rare if they exists at all, so we’re back to “usually”.